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Fabricating fine equiaxed grains without undesirable secondary phases is highly challenging for additively manufactured Ti−6Al−4V alloy. The reference amount of Ni addition, which can achieve grain refinement without secondary phase formation, is 0.9 wt. % based on Thermo-Calc calculation. The Ti−6Al−4V−0.9Ni alloy produced by laser-based directed energy deposition demonstrate refined microstructure and an ultrahigh yield strength (1309 MPa). A modified quantitative model is proposed to analyse the strengthening mechanism, and the results demonstrate that the yield strength increment is mainly ascribed to the refined α phase. This work can contribute to the development of customised titanium alloy using additive manufacturing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work investigated laser aided additive manufacturing (LAAM) high-strength steel by leveraging the intrinsic tempering effect to facilitate the formation of high-fraction of metal carbides (e.g. M23C6 and M7C3) in the as-built samples. The intrinsic tempering effect contributes to a superior mechanical property than traditional manufacturing methods in as-built condition, promoting subsequent heat treatments (HTs) for excellent mechanical properties. The influence of HTs on the microstructures and mechanical properties were characterised in multi-scales. A large number of carbides are intrinsically formed due to the tempering effect during deposition. The high-density dislocations in the as-built sample facilitate the formation of massive nano-twins and carbides during HT. The HTed sample achieves a true tensile stress of about 1.81 GPa together with a true strain of about 21%, achieving an excellent strength-ductility combination compared to wide-range high-strength steels processed by additive manufacturing and conventional methods. The grain and twin boundaries strengthening, precipitation strengthening and dislocation strengthening contribute to the high strength, while the good ductility originates from twinning induced plasticity (TWIP) and transformation-induced plasticity (TRIP) effects, and high work-hardening rate, during deformation. The findings imply a potential way to develop AM-customised materials by fully understanding and utilising the IHT effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surface monitoring is an essential part of quality assurance for additive manufacturing (AM). Surface defects need to be identified early in the AM process to avoid further deterioration of the part quality. In this paper, a rapid surface defect identification method for directed energy deposition (DED) is proposed. The main contribution of this work is the development of an in-situ point cloud processing with machine learning methods that enable automatic surface monitoring without sensor intermittence. An in-house software platform with a multi-nodal architecture is developed. In-situ point cloud processing steps, including filtering, segmentation, surface-to-point distance calculation, point clustering, and machine learning feature extraction, are performed by multiple subprocesses running simultaneously. The combined unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques are applied to detect and classify surface defects. The proposed method is experimentally validated, and a surface defect identification accuracy of 93.15% is achieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After solution + artificial aging treatment (T6 heat treatment) of 2219 aluminum alloy fabricated by laser-tungsten inert gas (TIG) hybrid method, more interestingly, we found that both the strength and elongation were improved. The strengthening mechanism has been analysed in details. Results showed that each layer was divided into the arc zone (AZ) and laser zone (LZ) before and after heat treatment. After T6 heat treatment, the columnar crystal grain morphologies remained the same as the as-deposited condition, while the microstructure presented a strong {001} texture along the building direction. Moreover, the high density of the needle-shaped θ″ phases were uniformly precipitated after artificial aging. Distinct grain morphology, increased the mass fraction of Cu in the Al matrix, and nano-precipitates in the AZ and LZ improved the tensile properties, which exhibited a yield strength of 242.1 ± 19.6 MPa, an ultimate tensile strength of 407.1 ± 31.1 MPa, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]